Interlude: Epistemic Violence

Abstract

Epistemic violence is a concept introduced to postcolonial studies by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988, see also ch. 5). Originally, Michel Foucault developed the idea of the episteme in Western thought in History of Madness and continued its exploration in The Order of Things. According to his definition, an episteme is the anonymous codification and structure which determines the knowledge formation of a given epoch. Thus, in the Renaissance the ordering episteme was ‘similarity,’ which was replaced by ‘representation’ and ‘classification’ in the Classical Age – roughly corresponding to the Enlightenment period (see ch. 7) – only to be superseded by the human being as the object of knowledge in the Modern Age. Knowledge and, following from this, discourses can only be formed within the confines of the respective episteme.